MYOB Accounting Plus 18 Tutorials
Creating Your Company File / Importing & Exporting Accounts
Subtitles of the Movie (MYOB Accounting Plus 18 / Creating Your Company File / Importing & Exporting Accounts)
In this lesson I'm going to show you how to Import and Export Accounts in MYOB Accounting. We're actually going to cover Exporting first because doing this will give us a file that we can then import back into MYOB. To export data from MYOB choose File, and Export Data. You can see here that we can export a huge range of things out of MYOB. The Export process for many of these, though, is the same or very similar to the one we're going to be going through. We'll be covering the ones with significant differences later on as we progress through this course. To Export our Accounts, choose Accounts, and Account Information. And now we get to make some choices. First up is the Export File Format. We get a choice of Tab-delimited or Comma-separated. Which one of these you choose will depend really on where you plan on using this information. Some third-party programs prefer one format or the other and many of them can work with either. If you're exporting to use in another MYOB Company File you can also use either format. In this example I'm going to open our Exported File in Microsoft Excel, which can also handle either format so we're going to set this to Tab-delimited. The next option box is labeled First Record is. Now if you've ever used a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel you may know that sometimes the first row displays the name of each column, or field, instead of just the data. To export your Accounts List like this, choose the Header Record option. To export without that first row choose Data Record. The next option is used to choose which month you would like Account Balances exported from. The Accounts List itself always stays the same but your balances will, of course, change over time, so select a Financial Year here and a Month. Let's hit Continue, and in this window we select which Fields we want to actually include in our export. On the right we have a list of Fields that are able to be exported and on the left we're shown the Fields that we have currently selected for export. At the start there are none selected, so let's select a few. To do this just single-click an entry on the right. Now this entry appears on the left and we know that it's going to be Exported. Let's click a few more and we can see now that we're given a little more information on the right. We're given the Export Order. Let's pop back over to Excel, and this Export Order simply determines which order these columns are going to be in. In this example the first one is Account Number, second one is Account Name, and so on. In many cases, this doesn't really matter, but sometimes it does and I usually just take the Save option and make sure that all of the Fields are in their Default order. And we can do this quite easily as well as select all the Fields for Export at one time by clicking the Match All button. Everything is selected now and it's all in the right order. To pull all of the entries out at once and start over, click Unmatch All. And finally, notice that the Account Number Field here has an asterisk next to it. This means that it's a required field and we're going to have to export at least this Field. OK, now that everything's ready let's hit the Export button and we're prompted for a File Name and a location to save it in. The default is ACCOUNTS.TXT, it's a text file, and I'll keep that and save it. Now let's have a look at our file. As I mentioned, I'm using Microsoft Excel, and here it is. Our Field Names are here at the top and all the data is in columns. I've included this file named ACCOUNTS.TXT in the Chapter 03 Folder in the Work Files. OK, let's see now how we Import a file like this back into MYOB. Choose File, and Import Data, Accounts, and Account Information. Now we're going to need to know two things about the file we're about to import. Number one, the File Format and number two, what the first record is. We've got things easy in our example because we just exported the file and we simply need to set these the same as they were during the Export. If you're importing a file that you've received from someone else, though, you'll need to either ask them about the file, or inspect the file yourself using a Plain Text Editor. Next, we need to tell MYOB what to do with Duplicate Records. It can either Reject them or Update and already existing record with the new information. We'll leave this set to Reject. Hit Continue, and now we pick the file to Import. Here's the one we just exported, so let's choose that. Similar to before, we now get to choose the Fields that we want to import. Notice again that the Account Number Field has an asterisk next to it. Hit the Match All button to select everything in its proper order, and hit Import. This will now process and we're shown an Import Summary. No errors, no warnings, but no records were actually imported and 120 records were skipped, so now we should probably find out why this has happened. MYOB Accounting keeps a log of the Import process, so if you want more information about how the Import went, look in the folder where your Company File is held for the file MYOBLOG.TXT. In a default installation like mine this is simply the myob18 Folder on my C drive. Before you can open the log file though, you'll have to click the OK button to finish this Import process otherwise you'll get an error message telling you that the file is already in use. So, I'll OK that, and let's go find that MYOBLOG file. Let's find it in here, and there it is. Open this file in a Text Editor and look down the left side. This first column displays any errors encountered during the Import process, and they all seem to have the error -5, what does this mean? Well, let's scroll all the way down to the bottom and we can see that this error is for Duplicate Account Number, and this is expected, and it means that our example has just gone perfectly. At the start of this lesson we exported all of our Accounts from our Company File. The actual Accounts though were still present in our Company File after the Export, so we basically just exported a copy. During the Import process we told MYOB to reject any duplicate records, and since the Accounts in our Import file were exactly the same as the ones already present in our Company File they were all rejected, or skipped, as the log tells us here. During actual Imports of business files you wouldn't expect to see these same messages, but hopefully now you know where to look to find any problems that might crop up. And that brings us to the end of this lesson on Importing and Exporting Accounts.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | MYOB Accounting Plus 18 |
| Author: | Rick Martin |
| SKU: | 34040 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-75-0 |
| Release Date: | 2009-09-25 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 130 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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